Today's Gospel is the "Watch" Gospel where Christ urges His followers to be alert to the return of God. "You do not know when the Lord of the house is coming."
of order before all things disappear. With the clock slung over my shoulder, in the silence of the Fourth of July, it is my time to be the night watchman, in the house that will one day perish.
He writes in a later poem, "The Night of Destiny":
In my ending is my meaning.
The Watch has always been an anxious time from the
watchman on the city walls to modern fiction's Night Watch. One of the
most beautiful pieces of writing on the subject comes from the Trappist
Thomas Merton in his "Fire Watch," the epilogue to The Song of Jonas.
A young monk was always tasked with with the job of checking the
monastery for unseen problems before retiring. Merton writes of his
walking through the monastery and it becomes an examination of
conscience, "a pretext devised by God to isolate you, and to search your
soul with lamps and questions, in the heart of darkness." This is how
it begins.
Watchman, what of the night?
The night, O my Lord, is a time of freedom.
You have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better.
In the night all things began, and in the night the end of all things has come before me.
Baptized in the river of night, Gethsemane has recovered her innocence. Darkness brings a semblanceof order before all things disappear. With the clock slung over my shoulder, in the silence of the Fourth of July, it is my time to be the night watchman, in the house that will one day perish.
He writes in a later poem, "The Night of Destiny":
See! See!
My love is darkness!
Only in the Void
Are all ways one:
Only in the night
Are all the lost
Found.
In my ending is my meaning.
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